Since the advent of telephone communications, callers have frequently failed to make contact with the individual they are calling either because that person is currently on another line, not in that location, or otherwise preoccupied. The resulting game of "phone tag" is both time and monetarily inefficient. The time and monetary costs are especially acute in the business environment as customers are faced with unanswered calls, extended waits on hold, unconveyed important information or the like.
In response to these problems, electronic voice and text messaging systems have been developed to provide a more reliable repository of messages. Voice messaging systems (VMSs), in particular, have proliferated in both residential and business use. In the residential context, VMSs may be as simple as an answering machine. In the business context, on the other hand, VMSs may be expensive and complex systems for use in telephone switching centers. VMSs are used to automate the answering of incoming calls from an external telephone network and the taking of messages when the extensions are not answered by the called parties. Individuals (senders), using standard dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) phones may gain access to the VMS and create messages that are then addressed and sent to one or more select other users (recipients) of the system. Such voice messaging systems incorporate features, such as the recording of voice messages for users in what are known as "mailboxes." Additionally, access to the VMS may also be gained by users calling from private branch exchange (PBX) extensions or from a telephone network over incoming trunk lines to access their mailbox to listen to deposited voice messages.
Another popular and rapidly growing mechanism for transmission and receipt of messages involves the use of computers that are connected together in a network such as a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN). One of the most common applications for communication between users within a network, such as Internet, is electronic mail (e-mail). In its infancy, e-mail systems only handled text-based messages. Increasingly, e-mail applications are being enhanced to also support the transmission and receipt of information in other formats, e.g., graphics, facsimile and voice.
Internet telephony applications are becoming an attractive alternate for conventional telephony services, primarily because of the promise of substantial reduction in communication costs. Furthermore, there are a large number of applications and new multimedia capabilities available on the Internet. The Internet "telephone" with a computing device, e.g., a personal computer, often employing a packet-based technology, provides the caller with a greater flexibility and control as opposed to the traditional telephone devices.
The two examples of disparate communication networks discussed above, i.e., switched telephone networks and packet-based networks, currently employ different addressing schemes to distinguish between users within their network systems. For example, traditional VMSs use telephone number addressing to identify the sender and recipient of a message. Voice messaging protocols typically use only numeric telephone numbers to identify the originator and recipient and, as a consequence, most conventional voice mail systems commercially available provide support only for telephone number based addresses. On the other hand, a packet network application, such as Internet voice messaging (IVM), uses the existing Internet e-mail infrastructure to extend the reach of the voice mail community. Internet protocols employ mailbox names along with domain name system (DMS) addresses to identify an originator and recipient of a message uniquely.
Disparate identification schemes employed by different communication networks further exacerbate the problems encountered when responding to received messages from a different communication network. Not only is recognizing the originator of a message a problem if the receiving communication network does not support the originator communication network addressing format, but also identifying the reply-to address to facilitate a reply.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an improved method for permitting disparate communication networks to send and reply to messages thereamong.